SEWING ROOM ORGANIZATION CHALLENGE

Fabric Nirvana

After coming back from Fabric Nirvana last week, I am a bit overwhelmed by both the overload and lack of fabric choices. While my NYC fabric district is full of silks and fancy fabrics, LA’s fabric district tends to cater more towards knits and cheesy fake fur.

I had planned to source printed (novelty) cotton knits for my boys’ line, but came up empty handed. Lots of solids to be found. And I met several knit suppliers at the LA Fabric Show. Some yardage minimums were too high while other fabric converters would work with small clothing lines to divide up their orders into dyeable lots. Not sure if I want to get into the whole knit dyeing process.

I did, however, order sample yardage of some cool cotton yarn dyes bottom weight fabrics which will need to be over dyed for my boys’ pants. How fun…not! I had originally visited this fabric converter in hopes of finding some neat denims, but got turned on by the cotton yarn dyes. The good thing about using these fabrics is I can use the same fabric in a pants’ design and then dye it in several different colors.

Examples of over dyed pants:

Found these fabrics on the web and MUST HAVE THEM…LOL! The retail web site doesn’t say who the manufacturer is, so I ordered 3 yards (keeping fingers crossed this info will be on the selvage edge). Unfortunately, they only had the beige/khaki colorway…I prefer the blue. Don’t you?

I was disappointed to find one of the fabric I was planning to use is made by Springs and is a licensed NASCAR print…DRATS! It would have worked perfectly with my NYC theme:

So here’s what I have so far:

Collection 1:

Collection 2:

Collection 3:

Collection 4:

Still need to add another collection or two…more to come!

And if deciding on fabrics is not enough when designing a clothing line, there are all the “inputs” to consider such as snaps, rivets, trims, leather labels, zippers, etc. I met a few supplier while in LA and then did hours and hours of Googling to find additional sources.

I was hoping to find metal jean snaps which resembled a NYC subway token, but unfortunately they are no longer produced and were purchased by a company who made them into cufflinks:

One of the gals on Fashion-Incubator came up with this idea for custom jean snaps (note: DOWNTOWN is really one word, so this would have to be edited). Perhaps instead of “dTj” I just put “NYC.” Either way, it would cost more than buying a stocked snap design. However, it may be worth it…KWIM?:

Then I had another idea for a custom jean snap (inspired by my recent NYC Manhole Rug purchase for my trade show display). I’d probably take out the word “SEWER” (pronounced sue-er)…not to be confused with “SEWER” (pronounced so-er):

Continuing along with other business updates…Ingrid is hard at work putting together my Downtown Joey web site. And guess what? I found myself a terrific PATTERN MAKER…yippee!